The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has issued show cause notices to five telecom operators for deteriorating quality of service levels.

The telecom regulator had earlier asked all operators to meet the specified quality of service norms by December 2005. However, after considering the reports filed by the telecom companies, it decided to issues notices to Bharti TeleVentures, Reliance Infocomm, Tata Teleservices, Spice Communications and BPL Mobile (now acquired by Hutch).

Other operators Idea Cellular, Hutch, BSNL and MTNL have been let off because the service levels have not deteriorated even though they are still short of the stipulated norms.

POI Congestion

"Being deeply concerned about the deteriorating level of Points of Interconnection (POI) congestion in the networks and also considering lack of efforts on the part of the service providers in effecting timely augmentation of interconnection, it was decided to issue show cause notices," said a TRAI release.

The benchmark prescribed by the authority for the parameter "POI Congestion" (congestion between the networks of two operators) is less than 0.5 per cent.

TRAI said that in spite of reminders, the performance of the cellular operators in meeting the Quality of Service benchmarks continued to be unsatisfactory and in the matter of POI congestion the number of places having congestion continued to be on the rise.

"It was also noticed that at several places the level of congestion of some of the operators was in the range of 80 per cent to 95 per cent.

"This means that out of 100 calls, 80 to 95 calls fail leading to total chaos in inter-network communications and heavy customer dissatisfaction and almost a collapse of the service.

"It is thus clear that due to the non-action by operators in streamlining interconnection, the subscribers are suffering greatly," TRAI said.

The telecom regulator said that the stance taken by the Cellular Operator Association of India (COAI), that unless the interconnection matters are resolved they should not be directed to ensure quality of service, was not acceptable.

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